Re: [xml-dev] SGML default attributes.

[John Cowan <johnwcowan@gmail.com>]

On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 9:50 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

I actually think it's unfortunate that public identifiers were included in XML; at least one of the people who argued for them so strongly at the time did so (he later told me) because he didn't understand Web architecture at the time and thought of a URI (a URL, at the time) as being like a filename rather than like an identifier with a distributed ownership system.

I've always thought that XML should have specified URIs/URLs as public identifiers, and left system identifiers for purely local purposes.  RFC 3151 (by N. Walsh, J. Cowan, and P. Grosso) does the opposite, providing a scheme for mapping FPIs into a subset of URNs. For example, the FPI for DocBook 4.1.2 (an example from the RFC) becomes "urn:publicid:-:OASIS:DTD+DocBook+XML+V4.1.2:EN".

--

GMail doesn't have rotating .sigs, but you can see mine at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/signatures